Sixfold Poetry Winter 2018

By Sixfold

Sixfold is an all-writer-voted journal. All writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the highest-voted $1000 prize-winning manuscripts and all the short stories and poetry published in each issue.
In Sixfold Poetry Winter 2018:
Bryce Emley | Asking Father What’s at the End & other poems
AJ Powell | Butterfly-minded & other poems
Faith Shearin | Biology & other poems
Claire Van Winkle | Admitting & other poems
Sarah W. Bartlett | Summer Cycles & other poems
Nooshin Ghanbari | Vincent & other poems
Meli Broderick Eaton | The Afterlives of Leaves & other poems
Jeddie Sophronius | Refugees & other poems
Paula Bonnell | In Winter, By Rail & other poems
Addison Van Auken Waters | Girls & other poems
Daniel Sinderson | Hallelujah & other poems
Andrew Allport | All Nature Will Fable & other poems
Marte Stuart | What an Insult Time Is & other poems
Matthew Parsons | My Father as an Inuit Hunter & other poems
Emily Bauer | Gently, Gently & other poems
Bruce Marsland | A once lovelorn bard’s final journey & other poems
Beatrix Bondor | Night Makers & other poems
Isabella Skovira | Lawless Conservation & other poems
Juan Pablo González | Colombia, 1928 & other poems
Molly Pines | The Pillbug & other poems
Jamie Marie | On the Lake & other poems
William A. Greenfield | If You Show Me Yours & other poems
Bill Newby | Tuesdays at The Seagate's Atlantic Grille & other poems
Elder Gideon | Male Initiation Rites & other poems
Joel Holland | Dear Gi-Gi & other poems
Martha R. Jones | How Lewis Carroll Met Edgar Allan Poe & other poems

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sixfold
• Release date: Mar 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463117279

Sixfold

Sixfold is an all-writer-voted short-story and poetry journal. All writers who submit their manuscripts vote to select the highest-voted $1000 prize-winning manuscripts and all the short stories and poetry published in each issue.

Book preview

Sixfold Poetry Winter 2018

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Sixfold and The Authors

www.sixfold.org

Sixfold is a completely writer-voted journal. The writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the prize-winning manuscripts and the short stories and poetry published in each issue. All participating writers’ equally weighted votes act as the editor, instead of the usual editorial decision-making organization of one or a few judges, editors, or select editorial board.

Each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.

Cover Art: Elena Koycheva. Online at instagram.com/lenneek/

License Notes

Copyright 2018 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue are acknowledged. Thank you for your support.

Sixfold

[e-mail]

www.sixfold.org

Sixfold Poetry Winter 2018

Bryce Emley | Asking Father What’s at the End & other poems

AJ Powell | Butterfly-minded & other poems

Faith Shearin | Biology & other poems

Claire Van Winkle | Admitting & other poems

Sarah W. Bartlett | Summer Cycles & other poems

Nooshin Ghanbari | Vincent & other poems

Meli Broderick Eaton | The Afterlives of Leaves & other poems

Jeddie Sophronius | Refugees & other poems

Paula Bonnell | In Winter, By Rail & other poems

Addison Van Auken Waters | Girls & other poems

Daniel Sinderson | Hallelujah & other poems

Andrew Allport | All Nature Will Fable & other poems

Marte Stuart | What an Insult Time Is & other poems

Matthew Parsons | My Father as an Inuit Hunter & other poems

Emily Bauer | Gently, Gently & other poems

Bruce Marsland | A once lovelorn bard’s final journey & other poems

Beatrix Bondor | Night Makers & other poems

Isabella Skovira | Lawless Conservation & other poems

Juan Pablo González | Colombia, 1928 & other poems

Molly Pines | The Pillbug & other poems

Jamie Marie | On the Lake & other poems

William A. Greenfield | If You Show Me Yours & other poems

Bill Newby | Tuesdays at The Seagate's Atlantic Grille & other poems

Elder Gideon | Male Initiation Rites & other poems

Joel Holland | Dear Gi-Gi & other poems

Martha R. Jones | How Lewis Carroll Met Edgar Allan Poe & other poems

Contributor Notes

Bryce Emley

Inheriting

—for Erin

Maybe we ask too much of the stars.

They must be tired from the weight of our small lonelinesses,

tired of being cast in our stories

when all they want is to show us the shape of the night.

They must know there’s so much space between them.

They must know how we talk of their dying,

how they’re already gone before they reach us,

and yet all they do is reach with arms so dim

they can’t even press the shadows from our figures,

the way we can’t stop ourselves

from becoming our fathers,

who didn’t know how to keep from hurting us.

It’s good to be loved so much

we can hurt the people we love.

It’s good to be always ending, and so needed, for now.

It’s good to tell someone

Here, and here, and here

as you touch the parts of your face you want to be kissed

and feel warmth from their lips

like light from trillions of miles away on your cheek, your temple,

the curve where your jaw meets your neck.

Grief

You don’t feel it. You have it

or you don’t.

No one tells you it’s like that.

They don’t tell you to have it is to feel everything

you’ve always felt 

but in new tongues, new colors, new coats 

in the same bright, busy country.

They don’t tell you feelings don’t matter,

the way you don’t feel

the bones you carry through the world

until you’re too tired to stand,

all that love you kept sleeping

waiting for the ones who would take it,

all your wondrous youth.

You won’t know it as a feeling.

You’ll know it by a lightness: a gift

of one less thing to be afraid of,

an openness already collecting your breaths, 

recurring dream 

losing its shape as you describe it

and even now can’t recall,

but know you had it.

You know you have it.

Asking Father What’s at the End of the Darkness

He says I think too much of falling things,

of what comes next.

Lately buzzards have been flying circles in my head,

I’d like to know to what extent we choose

our nightmares. I’m tired

of how things have to end, how everyone we love

are bonfires night has just begun to swallow.

I think this is why he needs God,

why my heart is always playing jackstraw with my ribs.

I’d like to know it will matter if I pray

for him, I believe in God

the way I believe in Icarus and starlight,

in bones waiting at the bottom of the sea.

I think he needs to think I’ll miss him when he’s gone,

ashes sketching wild shapes on the wind.

If I don’t speak it’s because I keep a prayer

lodged in my throat: Make me someone

worth hurting to see.

AJ Powell

Butterfly-minded

Do you write upon delicate places?

Imagination is the storied underside of lepidoptera wings:

     scales seamed together—papery and trimmed

          to triangle arcs, graceful for flight,

                    wandering from thorn to blossom.

Do you feed upon surprising things?

Make meals from an insect’s food-stuff:

     fennel, milkweed, aster, daylily;

          find shelter in a hollow tree

                    and travel among tall, wild grasses.

Do you grow in stages?

Nothing is certain except metamorphosis:

     egg on leaf, caterpillar slinky-crawling,

          chrysalis dangling susceptible,

                    and bodies winging wonder.

Have you journeyed generations in a day?

Poems are pollinators, flitting

     across oceans, the migration always

          for a flower’s sake and

                    our survival.

Are you, like me, butterfly-minded?

Velvety in the dark, then

     all manner of speckled and variegated,

          and become emanations of alabaster, or

                    iridescent and sorrowful in blue.

Do you wish to unleash every fleet thought?

When the butterflies in your stomach

     stir a hurricane with their wings,

          churning fear and discovery, do you

                    wish to release them, through seppuku?

Hike

      I like

           to pick

           my way